Gray
by ExtremeDancer
Summary: The end. She wondered, sometimes, how it had happened, but it was no good to wonder. The war was past. Survival was all that remained.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: Inspired by _The Handmaid's Tale_ , which I highly recommend.

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 _Gray  
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She was a pureblood and he was high-ranking, so naturally, he had gotten to choose. She still remembered standing in a line, that feeling of being cattle, the pause in the steady, stately padding of his footsteps as he came to a stop in front of her. She had lifted her head, though it was against some unspoken rule, had met his eyes, daring him to choose her. Prideful, despite the dirt on her skin, the old sweat perfuming her ragged clothing, the dried blood caking her hair. Fierce, she hoped.

She'd been surprised. That much she remembered. His wife must have died, she'd realized in that moment. Surely his son would've wanted to do his own shopping.

"Weasley, isn't it?"

"It was, sir." The reply came from somewhere behind her.

"Was?"

"The name of the blood traitors has been stricken."

How foolish. Her brothers, her parents, what were their names now? If they existed, if any of them lived, they were Weasleys still.

 _If_. It was the first time she'd said it.

Some of them were dead, she knew. She'd seen them fall in the final battle. Some, she hoped—as if hope was a thing she still believed in—had made it out.

She was under no delusions about her circumstances. She'd known what awaited her, what was expected of her. When the house elves had come to bathe her, she'd let them peel the filthy clothes from her battered body, allowed them to coax her into the water and lather her with perfumed soaps that stung in every cut on every limb. They'd dressed her in robes far finer than anything she'd ever worn, indeed anything she'd ever seen, and arranged her hair and made up her face before taking her outside.

There'd been a gathering there—faces she knew, faces that had either seen or done too much, faces that didn't belong together. His son was there after all, accompanied by a girl whose face she knew from Hogwarts. Purebloods all, or so she assumed.

When they'd brought her before the Dark Lord, she hadn't flinched. She hadn't begged or cried or tried to be brave. She'd simply _been_. He'd spoken to her, words that she couldn't remember now, and she'd replied in a voice hoarse and broken. No emotion. Why bother? When the Death Eaters around her had laughed, it had been a man beside her who had silenced them. She hadn't noticed him before, hadn't been certain when he'd stepped up to join her.

The ceremony had been swift. She hadn't objected. She hadn't resisted. She had said and done what was expected, slipping her hand in his, allowing him to press his lips to hers. When the Dark Lord had congratulated the man beside her, she had looked up at the sky, releasing a sigh that could not have gone unnoticed, but no one acknowledged her disrespect.

When he'd come to her that night, she had offered no resistance, lying back on the bed, eyes closed against the weariness as much as the onslaught. When he'd entered her, standing between her legs at the foot of the bed, her head had come off the pillow in surprise. Their eyes had met over her naked body. Wordlessly, he'd climbed onto the bed and settled his body on hers, her legs twining around him, faces much too close but indescribably not close enough. They'd moved together, silent but for the sighs and soft moans that could not be muted, and when he'd finished and left, her hand had crept down to stoke the only warmth her body could remember.

He bid her good morning when she entered the dining room. He hoped her day had been pleasant—that came with dinner. He was courteous—always, to a fault. He scowled if she didn't return the greetings, so she'd learned what to say and when. They ate in a silence that discouraged conversation but was not entirely hostile. Sometimes his son joined them with his wife, but never in the mornings. Mornings were theirs alone, whatever good that was.

When his friends came to call, as was prone to happen more often than not, she was silent, obedient, and accommodating. When it was someone she'd known before—Snape, Draco when he was alone—their eyes would inevitably meet briefly over the threshold or the pudding. Not in solidarity, or one-sided pity or commiseration. Just in acknowledgement, and that was enough.

He came to her often, arriving late in the evening and staying for more than one coupling. There was comfort in the thrusts of their bodies, the tangle of the blankets, the sweat, and the stolen moments of sleep before the fire rose again. She grew to appreciate the simple motion of running her hands through his hair, fingers bunching in the long silvery silk, and the lust it seemed to arouse in him. His name never escaped her lips, nor hers from his. Only the first syllables, the barest acknowledgement of the reality of their partner, were occasionally breathed into being.

Gi-

Lu-

Once, he had become too complacent.

His razors had greeted her when she'd entered the bathroom, long and silver and gleaming like the hair they tended. He'd found her a quarter of an hour later, staring, transfixed, at the blades. Their eyes had met in the mirror. When he'd reached around her to take the danger from her reach, his other hand had snaked around her waist, sliding down between her thighs.

The razors had been put to a different use that night.

That was the first time he'd stayed until morning. She'd awoken to him cradling her forearm, one finger gliding absently over the smooth pale skin. There was nothing to trace, of course. The evidence of the previous night's passion had been healed.

That was the morning he'd broken their silence. "What do you want?"

Want? She didn't want.

"What do you want?" He'd said again.

Everything. Nothing. Nothing she could have.

"One of your brothers lives."

He hadn't said which one. She'd doubted he cared, or perhaps he just hadn't known.

"I'll see him." Not _May I_ or _Will you let me_. I will.

It had been Percy that came to the manor. Of course Percy.

He had actually left them alone together, something that would have surprised her if she had allowed herself to feel.

"Ginny…"

Her name had sounded foreign. It was so rarely said. The house elves called her _mistress_. The others called her nothing.

"You're alive."

Was she? He sounded surprised, so she supposed she must be.

"Hello, Percy."

Their conversation had been stilted, and mercifully brief. When he'd awkwardly hugged her at the close, she'd felt nothing. Perhaps if it had been Bill, or one of the twins. Anyone but Percy.

Half a year.

He watched her sometimes. She could feel his eyes following her around the library, tracing her movements around the dining room. He didn't find her objectionable—she'd given him nothing to object to. Was he interested in her? Doubtful. She had been interesting, once, but the shell that remained did little that could be of interest to anyone. Boredom? Possibly. Lust? Probably. That was really all that existed between them.

The Ministry functions came and went, though the Ministry as it had been was gone. The parties, the balls, the ceremonies, were her only source of information. Luna, Neville, purebloods older and younger than herself. Their bodies were there, their faces, but not the spirits that had once lived inside. She understood. She was no different. Harry, of course, was dead, as was Ron. Hermione… she wouldn't think what may have happened—had almost certainly happened—to her.

Other faces she knew. Faces the girl she had been had fought against. They glided around the ballrooms, mindless of the former enemies in their midst. When the Dark Lord appeared, as he inevitably did, they knelt as one, Death Eaters and their captives alike. Cowed. Subservient.

Defeated.

Night was ever the same. Though she never resisted him—welcomed him, even—it seemed sometimes that he wished she would. This made her wonder, and then realize with certainty though she had no proof. The Death Eaters had attacked—that she'd known—and they had raped. Their need to feel power had extended beyond magic, reaching deep inside them to something primal and feral. They'd enjoyed it. _He_ had enjoyed it. Strange that she could learn that wordlessly, in relative safety, simply from his presence in her bed.

His bed, really. Everything was his.

A year.

The Dark Lord was displeased with him. She understood without being told—she had produced no baby. He'd threatened him, of that she was sure, because he came to her every night now. Their pleasure had taken on a desperation that only served to intensify their meetings. If he fell out of favor, she would be passed on. That knowledge brought with it a tingling of something she'd not felt in months. Fear.

The morning she fell back on the mattress from dizziness, she knew. He'd done it. They'd done it.

The child grew inside her. He still came often, but less and less for sexual purposes. His hand would find her belly, fingers splayed over the growing roundness. The child learned to respond to his touch, pushing back against his palm to make itself known. When this happened, something in his face would soften, the lines drawn by the war receding for a few brief moments, something akin to tenderness rising in his eyes. Sometimes—rarely—when he'd been drinking but not reached drunkenness, or when he'd fallen asleep beside her and was still caught between sleep and wakefulness, he'd share that look with her, looking full into her face with an expression more intimate than anything else they'd shared. It made it hard to breathe.

She wondered what her face looked like in those moments.

She was unsurprised when the child was a boy (he was part Weasley, after all). She was relieved that this, at least, meant he would not be passed off to another like a broodmare. His light hair stung her heart, but here and there a freckle dotted his fair skin.

They gathered to present the child to the Dark Lord. When he asked what the child would be called, Ginny blithely suggested, "Tom."

She had been crucioed for that. It had been worth it.

He had not come to her that night.

In the end, they called the child Abraxas after his grandfather. He had agreed when she'd suggested Charles for the middle name. He hadn't appeared to recognize its significance. She knew he had.

She had gone to him that night.

Two years.

The gala was much like the others. Lavish. Interminable. Suffocating. Percy found her and seemed to take genuine delight in his nephew. His own wife was heavily pregnant. Percy was excited, said the child would come soon.

She hoped it would have red hair.

When it happened, it happened in an instant. A wizard in the center of the ballroom had calmly raised his wand. The room exploded.

She awoke on the floor, covered in debris and blood. Behind her, Abraxas screamed in the arms of his broken nanny. She freed him from the dead woman's hold, pulling him to her chest in the pandemonium—

The wand. The nanny's wand.

Her fingers closed around it. For the first time in two years, her magic stood ready.

Chaos. The figures that fought the Death Eaters were unfamiliar, whirling dress robes of black and blue and red, every color muted by the dust and debris in the air, settling on the fabric, choking their breath. She learned later the rest of the world had banded together in this room. French. German. Russian. American.

Power flowed through her. When Bellatrix strode toward her, she cut her down in an instant, without hesitation. She shielded herself against others, protecting the child who bore her eyes. She yearned to go on the offensive. To fight. To kill.

He appeared out of the chaos, saw the wand in her hand. Something tightened in her stomach. They faced each other, wands raised, but when he fired it was the figure behind her who fell. Slowly, they turned their attention away from each other, protecting each other, protecting themselves, until they stood together, an impenetrable wall against the onslaught of friend and foe.

And when the dust settled, when it became clear the Dark Lord was no more, that the lives of his followers were forfeit, she'd lowered her wand and let him go. 

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Thank you for reading. If you read, please review!


	2. Chapter 2

_Gray_

Six months.

 _A return to normalcy._ It was the phrase the Ministry used. Idiots. The normal they'd known was irretrievable. It had been demolished in the sea of green, serpentine smoke that had swept the land, decimating the fruits of the lives before them. The survivors would find a new equilibrium, someday, when the horrors of the past had faded from the minds of the young and the innocent, but normalcy was relative. And normalcy was gone.

One year.

The child grew. She could see the pity in the faces they passed, the wariness in their eyes when they looked at him. Neanderthals. Frightened by a one year-old. His name was also Weasley now, but it hardly mattered. His silver-blonde hair was condemnation enough.

They didn't dare voice their censure, perhaps out of respect for her family name. More likely it was fear of the alteration of her own. He could've taught her things. He could have changed her. After all, she had chosen to keep the name he'd given her.

The manor was unchanged since his escape. The house elves answered to her and the child who so resembled his father. The solitude suited her. She'd ignored Percy's protests over appearances. It hardly mattered what they said about her, and they would say it no matter her actions. It was her home, one she had earned with caresses and sweat, and she would not be driven from it, not like before. The Ministry had come to raid the manor. Once. She had shown them the ferocity borne of mixing fire and ice, and they hadn't come again.

Two years.

The room was icy that summer night. She awoke to nothing but a cloud of breath in the air before her. Her hands came up hard, pushing at the chest she instinctively knew was there, but then his weight came down harder and she knew the body on hers. When his hands burned a path up her bare thighs, pushing the fabric of her nightgown up to her waist, she fumbled with the robes she couldn't see until they met, skin-on-skin, and she lifted her hips to meet his.

All that time and she hadn't changed the wards.

It hadn't been an oversight.

Three years.

She could see it on his face. The boy wanted to ask about his father. He'd been biting back the questions for weeks, the reality of the answer already written somewhere on his tender heart. She didn't give the answers he sought but left unsaid. He'd know soon enough. Too soon. And no explanation that would suffice.

She locked the doors to her chambers every night. He came to her in much the way he had in the time before, sharing stolen moments of pleasure in the darkness, leaving before the sun's rays broke the grayness of the room. They didn't speak, not beyond the whispered, heated utterances that could not be suppressed. She wondered about his life. Not enough to ask.

She helped catch his old compatriots, delivered them to justice tempered by mercy they didn't deserve. Unfortunately, she didn't know her old husband's whereabouts. No one doubted she'd have turned him in if she had.

His son—free of Azkaban for a cause beyond reason—had come to see her. In the fortress of his childhood home they'd agreed, planning over small talk and tea cups, their unspoken thoughts laid bare between them. The determination in his gray eyes had burned, glowing hot like the fire she had with his father. The son didn't know of her frequent visitor, but the father had heard. She'd felt him there, unseen in the space behind her.

Their names would be great again—both of them.

Four years.

Their names could not be salvaged. Percy's explanation was gentle, but his voice held no doubt. The wizarding world as it was would not accept that family back into its fold. Ginny could read the things he wouldn't say, see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice. She was a fool to live in that house, to fight for his son, to be cloaked in a name that invited suspicion and fear. Others had suffered, he said, and others had pieced together the pieces of their old lives.

Fools. What she wanted to be true was irrelevant. Those years had happened. She would not pretend otherwise.

She would rebuild without him.

She'd gone to Gringotts, as much out of boredom as anything else. She'd gone unsummoned, unblinkingly breaking rules as she walked, heedless of the stares and the calls her unfaltering steps provoked. When the Head of Magical Law Enforcement came, tried to forestall her, she shook her brilliant hair free, allowing the branding color to remind him who she was. The family name she had once carried—still carried—far outweighed his own. He acquiesced with little further fight.

She stood in the door of the vault, the gold the Ministry had sought to seize gleaming and gloriously hers. She had more than earned it.

Five years.

She'd changed the wards. His presence had been a distraction. The intensity of his interest in her efforts, their nighttime passions, had made his presence impossible to hide from their son. His watchful eyes and his youthful lips could not be trusted to stay unseeing and silent. They were his father's, after all.

His other son visited often, eschewing the company of his own wife for that of his father's. The former had grown tedious, he confided once in a voice that barely cared. That had drawn a smirk from her, the ghost of the spirit that used to burn through her flickering briefly to life.

Together, unstoppable, they brought Diagon Alley to heel.

Six years.

He'd found her as she walked through Knockturn Alley. The head of short black hair, the smooth hand of a younger man pressed against her throat, the strength in the wiry frame that held her against a wall—they didn't fool her. She had dug her nails into his unfamiliar wrist, pushing him away even as she apparated them out of the public space.

When her husband revealed himself clearly for the first time since their end, she couldn't help feeling smug. The years had not been kind. She noted it with a kind of wicked satisfaction.

 _No._

The word was loud in the silence of the deserted field. His eyes had narrowed. Those eyes, the ones that had observed her, anchored her, been burned into her over two years of captivity. The ones his son bore. The ones her son bore. He obeyed her command, didn't approach further, but his eyes left little to imagine about his feelings in that moment. It didn't bother her. She didn't fear his anger.

 _Not yet._

Some of the fury left his eyes. He didn't need an explanation. He'd followed her from Diagon Alley, had seen the name on the buildings she passed. He'd probably followed his son, too. He wasn't stupid. He could see what she was doing.

When he left her, she breathed the final words to the wind.

 _Perhaps not ever. Never again._

Seven years.

 _Go_ , it said. His son's letter was mercifully brief. _They found him_.

They'd allowed her entrance to the courtroom without question. Her status—as his wife, as his captive, as the one he had most wronged—granted her that. He'd been chained to the chair, straight and stately. Disdainful, even now. The silver hair falling tangled and wild across his bloody face couldn't hide the cold fury in his eyes.

 _Madame Weasley-Malfoy_.

The name brought her attention that her entrance had not. The weight of every eye in the room upon her, she looked only at him. He held her stare, unblinking, unaffected, and unapologetic.

One step closer. The echo of her soft footfall filled the damp room. Another. A third. She stopped, her eyes never leaving the face she had held so close for two years a lifetime ago.

 _Give him to me._

The murmurs were silenced as quickly as they'd started.

 _Kingsley_. Ginny hadn't turned to him. Bits of the young woman he'd known and seen destroyed, not on her face but in her voice. She could feel it, could hear it in that one word. The Minister didn't move, allowing the moment of silence, of weight and history and heart, to stretch. _Give him to me._

And he had, in a fashion.

Eight years.

Wandless, friendless, caged but wild, he raged in his wing of the Manor. His son sometimes saw him, less and less frequently. Their son did not.

The rumors never ceased to fly. He was being tortured. He was controlling his wife. He was being controlled. He wasn't there at all. He'd never been captured. He'd died. He lived on. His wife and sons continued their lives, but he was never seen outside the Manor that bore his name.

He was different when she came, always different. He'd rage. He'd be silent. He'd menace. He'd turn his back. He'd shake her by the throat and throw her across the room, when she allowed it. He'd run a finger down her cheek, a hand down her body-also when she allowed it. He'd fall to his knees and beg with the indignity borne of being broken. Through all of it, she never spoke to him. Each time she watched, waited, twirling her wand between her fingers, offering him the same infuriating protection he'd given her. And when she'd had her fill, she'd back out of the room, holding his gaze while she closed him in.


End file.
